My thoughts have been pretty much similar. Also, some people think it's a good idea to let guards sight fade to black when koed, so they can't see where the thief is going to escape.

Also, the time penalty has to be higher for thieves/guards that suicide for supplies (I was thinking about resupplying ingame, even for thieves. Perhaps pickpocketing?) because unlimited lives makes suiciding easy. I was thinking about having a double penalty. Both can be determined by a ratio, let's say 50% for example. The time penalty takes two minutes. Now, one minute will be simply substracted from the match time (team penalty), and the thief has to wait for one minute (player penalty). I don't know if it's that a good idea, but it's still friendlier as the current life system. Not to forget, timer has to be affected by the playercount as well, so a higher playercount causes a longer match.

I would be fine with a low timer (10-15 minutes) and 2 lives per thief.

Let the clock beat thief teams, outright or by forcing them to be rash. Give thieves and guards tools and abilities that can be replenished (but still should be rationed carefully) so the pace of the game remains constant and it never becomes impossible for either team to win. Also this means there is no point in 'suiciding for equipment', because there is no advantage to gain except for a new health bar... 2 lives for thieves, guards cannot be DM'ed (so no point really).

Guards: oil meter for torch/lantern and bolts that can be resupplied. Repairable whistlers that dispel invisibility.

Thieves: Invisibility meter, which recharges slowly when they hide in shadows (instead of potion) and water arrows that can be replenished by collecting water crystals (as in thievery)

For now its best not to suggest too many new innovative ideas. The creators have enough on their plate for new ideas and stuff. Best to give one idea a whirl before new ones are tossed about. Oil metres and stuff are just going to add to the workload. The basic ideas of unlimited lives but time penalties I think is a good gameplay approach to follow though. It definitely reduces boredom, but keeps a penalty.

Stuff wouldn't be resupplied autmatically after dying, surely. That makes dying a blessing.

imo better to decide what is needed, than to waste time making stuff you don't need.

I think there would be very little difference between an infinite lives system with a respawn time punishment and just giving each player two lives. Both could work, but i'm not sure about punishing the team by lowering the timer. The timer should count down 'till sunrise' or something.

Time limit has to be short of course. Something like 5 minutes per guard player, so a 2v2 might last 10 minutes. Eeer wait, better rethink this anyway the point is clear that time limit has to be short and depending on playercount.

Resupplying is fine. I think even supply chest is nice if it's not being exploited (boltspamming etc.). But thieves need a resupply advantage too.

I thought about picking moss/water like the water crystals. Some potions can be pickpocketed from guards would be cool. Problem solved . (it's not logical having guards running around with inv potions they are just about to throw away )

Crackaz kept some stats ages ago (maybe 1.3) showing that guard and thief wins were almost identical in count after the circle-strafing had been fixed.

It was never "fixed" they simply added wakeup timers mate. The mechanic of koing was never touched. It did however change the gameplay enough, as being koed (which was arguably easier than killing) amounted to killing a guard before 1.3 was patched.

Personally, you need koing, and stabbing, and fighting to create the opportunity for the sides to interact in more ways than simply, find loot, spot thief, chase thief and of course so the thieves can balance certain unresolvable situations

I would be fine with a low timer (10-15 minutes) and 2 lives per thief.

Let the clock beat thief teams, outright or by forcing them to be rash... ... 2 lives for thieves, guards cannot be DM'ed (so no point really).

Perfect way to have it imo, and something I always wanted in thievery.
KOed/killed timer for guards needs to be sufficient to stop them rushing back constantly with new gear to abuse a "expendable" life.

As for DMing etc, I personally feel it should be there in some regard, even if not as heavily as thievery, as unless you only want a cat and mouse game, it keeps the interactions diverse.

It was never "fixed" they simply added wakeup timers mate. The mechanic of koing was never touched. It did however change the gameplay enough, as being koed (which was arguably easier than killing) amounted to killing a guard before 1.3 was patched.

Personally, you need koing, and stabbing, and fighting to create the opportunity for the sides to interact in more ways than simply, find loot, spot thief, chase thief and of course so the thieves can balance certain unresolvable situations

Perfect way to have it imo, and something I always wanted in thievery.
KOed/killed timer for guards needs to be sufficient to stop them rushing back constantly with new gear to abuse a "expendable" life.

As for DMing etc, I personally feel it should be there in some regard, even if not as heavily as thievery, as unless you only want a cat and mouse game, it keeps the interactions diverse.

Ey

I think we all agree that take out the combat aspect might make the game less appealing to some... so be assured that there will still be elements of it in the game (not that you have to use it). The ability to kill and remove guards out of play will be removed.

Nah, Agg. It encourages too much DM. On Thievery, the amount of DM is just ludicrous. You have to remember that first and foremost, these are stealth games. KO is too fun to really get rid of it completely, however, killing is just too power. Guards should spend an amount of time in a KO state and wake up after their penalty. Maybe in replacement to killing with broadhead bows, (for the guns/bullets that Illum wants instead) you can a sort of stun shot which paralyses the enemy. You can then just run up to him and KO.

Whether they remove killing totally (for TvG this is what I want - us thieves just get dmed by guards way too much!), or just reduce it to acceptable levels (like it takes 5 thieves to kill 1 guard IF they're lucky) they should really, completely, fix that awful running ragdoll bug

It should be pretty easy overcoming DMing in Thievery by some small modifications, but I don't know if they apply to NB gameplay. Three simple things:
1. Remove one hit killing unalerted AI
2. Remove the sword
3. Remove the five free Broadheads from the default loadout

The ideas of decreasing the wake up time might be good, but not by too much. It's far more important to force frob-wake up on servers and making sure there aren't any areas of the map that can be used as dumping grounds for bodies (or chest if you'll have it) without a way out that even the AI can figure out without killing themselves.

Not so much, this is what lead to death squads in thievery, where a team of good DMer's would overcome the odds (if you can even really say that) by all outnumbering 1 or 2 guards at a time with combined force that was too hard to compete with as a single guard, while the team still controls/locks the level down.

One shot killing was a bit.. hmm but was always left in because it tied into thief. It was fine to a point, but I think removing both that mechanic and the free arrows is to much.

Again, that's not to say it shouldn't be different in NB.
I'm all for toning down the thief' sides ability to kill quickly, as long as the KO timer or the punishment for reckless guarding is sufficient.

Killing guards off became really popular (and then the standard) because guard players would abuse the fact they were KO'd (as they spawned instantly) by rushing back to where they got KO'd and firing off 800 worth of gear to get the kill that they couldn't get the first time, since KOing then became no penalty for guards, the thieves would start killing to punish the guard team as much as possible for playing that way, vicious circle after that.

Well, the obviously solution is the timed penalty for guards, but the inability for thieves to completely take guards out of the game. Guards would wake up after a while, but -vitally important- thieves can't carry their bodies and throw then into fires or an area that takes them out of the game? That, although obviously a very nice touch, makes the thieves too powerful.

(GTA) When your health reaches 0, you fall unconcious and respawn at the nearest health point.

So with NB, on hitting 0 health you collapse, unconcious. This of course means you're KOed, which in turn kicks in with the default ko timer (15 seconds) and then you can respawn, buy your stuff (when that's put in ) etc, and if the thief is still where you left them all that time ago, serve 'em right if you decide to investigate the shadows.

However the ability to pick-up, carry and hide bodies shouldn't be removed, just add ragdoll blocker code into the fire-actors, so that ragdolls just get pushed back from flames (maybe with an "ow!" just so we can have twisted fun rebounding enemy ragdolls against fires in NB .

It's not like the code doesn't already check whether an AI can move around, and moves them to a near-by pathnode when they're ready to wake so they don't telefrag themselves, so just always make them wake at a near-by node, then don't put any nodes outside the playing area.

Maybe even have Guard-Only PathNodes, which take spawn priority, so that if the thief spawn is accessible by guards (such as flats for example) then there are guardnodes only in the guard regions, so people won't respawn in thief-spawn.

What's wrong with letting the guards die and respawn them at a guardhouse say, one every 45 seconds, until the guard team is full again? That's how it was in the old beta way back when and not only did I really like it but it was a very solid mechanic and incredibly simple, removing the worry of any corpse exploits because they are just that...corpses.

In that case there should be support for several spawn points across the map, just simple basement doors which won't let the player through. When a guard is killed then whatever time limit later an AI can safely spawn at the nearest "closet" and walk out to the take up the killed guys route again.

Should avoid having all the AI spawn in the same place and then having to walk across the map to get to where they were patrolling earlier on

That's exactly how it was in the beta map Kasto. Multiple spawns would possibly be better but it depends on whoever is coding it to implement. The AI would (re)spawn at the guardhouse and walk to their original patrol route, this meant it was possible for the thief team to wait and slaughter them one by one or provided a region of the map where no lone thief would wander freely. Personally I'd only like to see one or two spawns on a map, when there was only one you had the immersive feeling that reinforcements were being called from somewhere rather than the sense that bots were being respawned in a game.

You could still go berserk but it would have lesser impact since you'd at best won yourself some time until the boxes plop a new one and at worst wasted time and resources/health. Would shift focus more to evasive gameplay (since the longer a guard is around the more he prolly faces attrition).

On the other hand youd prolly end up with guards behaving like suicide bombers. Would need more nonlethal Thief tools for stalling/stopping guards which are increasingly potent the more a guard puts himself at risk. Say you barge into complete darkness the thief gets a bonus to his new nonlethal blackjack which enables him to make you go groggy (like cracked but unable to move) for 20 seconds when it would be 10 seconds dizzy screen with movement capability normally or so.

The simplest way to deal with that is probably to put a considerable delay on how often a fresh guard spawns meaning that at first a dead player can leap right back into the action but a few minutes into the round of reckless playing and the guard players are waiting in a queue for the respawns (which sounds bad but is better than being out of the round as in Thievery and is suitable punishment for all being reckless). Abolishing the Thievery way of restocking a guard on spawn negates any bonus a guard would get from a kamikaze run.

If a mapper wished the idea could also be expanded on to do something such as ring a bell or light a signal fire which would give an increase to the guard spawn rate or a one off squad of reinforcements.

Not exactly, that would be a pain to balance. Think simpler. The AI guards would respawn every...60...seconds and resume an empty patrol route. Dead players automatically take over a random AI guard so while there are plenty of spare AI this is instant (or with a small delay if we choose). If the guards are depleted faster than one a minute there will reach a point where there are more guard players than available guard units, the players will then be forced to sit in a queue until a fresh AI guard spawns which will be immediately taken over by the next player in line until the queue is empty and AI controlled guards continue to fill up the ranks.

Of course the arbitrary value of 60 seconds may need to be adjusted, possibly on a per map basis, there may need to be an additional delay (like 15 seconds) for players who just died to avoid them immediately rushing back to where they died and there will need to be some mechanic to 'catch' players who don't have an AI to spawn into to prevent them being 'out' as happened in Thievery once the KO timer was put in - you would often have guard players waiting for an AI to wake up before clicking off the death screen to avoid being banished from the rest of play.

If the guards are depleted faster than one a minute there will reach a point where there are more guard players than available guard units, the players will then be forced to sit in a queue until a fresh AI guard spawns which will be immediately taken over by the next player in line until the queue is empty and AI controlled guards continue to fill up the ranks.

So, the thieves KO all the guards but one (just as it so often is in Thievery-Strike) and the guards are stuck waiting for 15-60 seconds, while the thieves just rush the objectives, rush back to the exit and win with a total lack of care or worries that they can easily be found and caught.

Sounds like nothing would be really changing between Thievery and nightblade with that idea

I would imagine with your idea this wouldn't happen when people are first playing NB, but as with TuT as people get better and learn the game, they'll find out ways to do such things.

Why are we sticking with the idea of actually KO'ing guards and they're out... its so 1999.

Why not render the guard incapacitated for a shorter amount of time, that way the life isn't taken, and your back on the ball after 15 seconds or so. Makes for a faster game, and thieves will really need to plan who gets hit and what exactly they're gonna do after it....

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Mach has a point. As players get better as thieves they will also get better as guards. If a guard is getting knocked out every 15 seconds then the entire team is totally incompetent or the game mechanics are broken. One thief versus one guard should end in guard victory about 80% of the time because guards are meant to be avoided, that's why thieves have the ability to hide.